


Facts That Matter

by hiza-chan (callunavulgari)



Series: Facts That Matter [3]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Derogatory Language, FTM verse, Genderqueer Character, M/M, Partying, Recreational Drug Use, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-11
Updated: 2014-03-11
Packaged: 2018-01-15 07:53:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1297204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/hiza-chan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were only so many afternoons that Roxas could waste practicing kick flips and humming Madonna in the day-glow, beach sunshine. It was time to dive off the deep end, swarm in the city shadows, and sing it out loud for once. <i>To know you, is to love you.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Welcome to the Planet

**Author's Note:**

> And here we have the main fic. Again, first four chapters are not mine.

**_The tension is here  
Between who you are and who you could be  
Between how it is and how it should be_  
  
xXx**  
  
  
 _North was good_ , Roxas thought to himself, flicking his cigarette over the brim of the open window and watching the ash sweep away into the oncoming traffic. _Or wait- was it east?_  
  
Whatever direction they were moving, it was away from the beach where five and a half hours ago, they were watching the sun hover over the crystal shell of the ocean in Riku’s rearview mirror. Roxas was shit with directions, but he prided himself in having a good sense of where he was going. Given that Riku was driving though, he supposed that it was better to say that he had the good sense to trust the older boy to find all the right routes and highways; but, after all, it wasn’t the first time any of them had made the trip before, and it was different this time, because, _well-_  
  
 _North. It was definitely north._ Roxas leaned his head against the plush headrest that throbbed with the beat of Smash Mouth blasting from the back speakers.   
  
"God, Sora. Can you turn it down?"   
  
"Fuck you, _I'm an All Star!_ "  
  
Roxas scrunched his lips up in a crumpled scowl, pulled his feet to rest on the shoulders of the seat in front of him, and imagined thwacking Sora with his Chuck Taylors. At least the salty runoff smell from the ocean had wafted from Riku's car a few hours ago; it made the trip a little more bearable despite the fact that Sora had been playing the Shrek soundtrack since they stopped for gas a few towns back. _Fuck_ , were his nerves on edge. He deserved to unwind a little, especially now that the watery trills of the ocean had been replaced the droning engines of automobiles traveling alongside them.   
  
Living on the beach was no easy feat for Roxas. It wouldn't be easy for anyone who suffered from a pretty well-constituted fear of water. He could drink and bathe, for God’s sake, but when it came down to standing at the brink of the tide, looking out at any wide blue wonder and then being expected to swim in it? It was more than enough to freak him out a little. Shallow water was okay for a few, brief minutes, but Roxas really just liked to do things on the beach part of the beach. Like sitting or playing volleyball, or making sandcastles. Actually, he liked the cement park of the beach the best, which didn't really count as ‘beach,’ but it was where he could skate away in the opposite direction. And anyway, he couldn't stay focused enough on volleyball and hated the feel of sand in between his fingers. He was much better at thrashing public domain with his board.   
  
While Sora was a big surfer and spent more time in the water than a fucking schooner, Roxas had only really been out on the water once. When Riku moved away from Destiny Islands all those years ago, Roxas endeavored to cheer up his dork brother by agreeing to be floated out on a board and taught to surf. Riku was only Sora’s _best friend of all time_ , so when his family decided to move inland, Sora’s little boy-heart cracked in two. He spent all of his time laying stomach-flat on his surfboard, drifting around in the blue waters, and poignantly ignoring his parent’s concerns that he wasn’t spending enough time on solid ground. So, Roxas bit the bullet and threw the boy a bone, or more matter-of-factly, he threw away his concern for his well-being, just to spawn some sort of smile on his brother’s face.   
  
It was all to no avail, though, because as soon as Roxas shakily stood up on the surfboard, he was swept under by an unexpected swell and nearly drowned in a state of bubbly, salt-tasty panic. Thank goodness Sora had shown an unexpected bout of quick thinking and dragged Roxas up from the dredges of the ocean. Back on solid ground, coming to with the sour taste of seawater in his mouth and the feeling of lukewarm gravel drying onto his slick body, Roxas decided that he would always like things hot and dry, and threatened to move away to the desert when Sora timidly tried to convince him back on the board for another go.   
  
You could say that Roxas was as maladjusted to water as a domesticated cat.  
  
The near-death experience excitement threw Sora out of his slump, at the very least. And of course, Riku managed to visit a few times over the following months from Twilight, which eased the stress and strain of their young bromance and its effects on their respective families. In spite of the exponential rate of noogies and various tropical reptiles in his bed during Roxas’s adolescence, having Riku stick around for one weekend a month was infinitely better than watching Sora marinate in his sulkiness the rest of the time.   
  
Occasionally, when their parents were lenient and the waves were dead, Riku invited Sora to visit him inland, and Roxas would experience the most peaceful weekends of his life. It got even easier when Riku got an old clunker once he got his license and was able to ferry the two of them around easy, without anyone’s parents taking responsibility. But then of course, at that age they started testing the limits of that privilege, doing the things that _teenagers_ do: experimenting with drugs, sex, and worse, legal boundaries. When Sora wandered off from Riku’s seventeenth birthday party, there was no foolproof way he could hide the fact that he was high out of his mind when he got picked up by the cops trying to accost a fast food pick-up window for french fries at three in the morning. Sora had either smoked some serious chronic or was just naturally in his element, drenched in sweat and the smell of weed, and smiling like a vapid idiot on the car ride back from Twilight at nine in the morning. He was the _only_ one smiling.   
  
After grounding him for a month, Roxas was assigned to be Sora’s perpetual baby-sitter, since of course he didn’t have _anything_ better to do than make sure his older brother didn’t get into any more trouble. When Riku was allowed to make his monthly pilgrimage to the beach again, Roxas was all but handcuffed to him, forced to _chaperone_ his visits. It drove him insane for a short while, tagging along with the dynamic duo on their little escapades around Destiny islands, but to his annoyance, it got easier. Riku always paid for their food, out of some awkward survivor’s guilt for his best bud. And most of the time, Roxas could just ignore whatever they were doing, hop on his board and go smoke a joint against the chain-link fence of the skate park. It got even easier when the wonder-twins followed him one day, and they spent the entire afternoon cleaning out Roxas’s stash and knocking each other off the edge of the half-pipe. It was an eye for an eye kinda deal that worked well enough for the three of them. Roxas taught Riku to roll a proper joint and Sora smiled and lied about paper airplanes when their parents found the crumpled rolling papers stuffed in their jacket pockets.   
  
Then Sora was finally set free from his proverbial shackles by the ‘rents, and allowed to leave their property without an escort, and the trips to Twilight Town started up again in full force. But Roxas was further expected to scurry along after Sora on his journeys inland with Riku. And that meant really keeping an eye on his brother, and following him to whatever basement party, or weird underground rave to make sure that Sora and Riku stayed within a relative definition of sobriety at all times.   
  
That didn't necessarily mean that Roxas had to stick around _all_ the time.   
  
Going to parties in the city was all dark corners and quick highs— nothing compared to the free party dynamic of the beach. Regardless of the differences, _damn_ , Roxas could not ignore the talent. Living on the beach had its advantages, namely the fact that clothing was expendable for the male population, but the city, _wow_ , the city never slept. It was irresistibly better than spending a Saturday night thumbing through a skating magazine with a doobie pinched in one hand and his dick in the other. It was a welcome change of scenery.   
  
Early on at these parties he was _Sora’s dorky brother_ and just a rut in their weird boy-friend dynamic, but as Riku and Sora realized that Roxas could care less what the two of them did, his moniker simply lapsed into, _Roxas._ He doubted that either of them even noticed the change- especially Riku, as he was the one introducing them to people most oftentimes and most argreeably a dimwit- but it was good. It was _right_ in the way that Roxas relished and had been wanting for a long, LONG time.   
  
In the sandless labyrinth of the city, he had free reign, liberated from not only his parents, but from the entire tropic atmosphere and everyone’s half-inspired expectations. He was nobody there, and it worked. He bummed cigarettes from burn-outs and smoked spliff with strangers. The first time he got his rocks off with a tall brunette in the back of Riku’s Lincoln on New Years without his brother suspecting a thing about it the next morning gave Roxas a better thrill than the sex did.   
  
So when spring break rolled around, Roxas all but danced a jig at the chance to spend a week in Twilight with Riku and Sora in the big city's phosphorescent embrace. He suffered the ride to the city, two freaky, unclean rest stops, a extra large bag of funions, and half a pack of stale cigarettes. All for the sake of his nerves and the promise that he was going to make himself once Riku snapped and tossed Sora's CD out the window after four consecutive replays of Willie Nelson singing "On the Road Again" and put on some of his chilled-out hipster grooves.   
  
When the sky turned purple through the dirty windows of Riku’s car and the twilight city lit up in fluorescent wonder; while Sora clumsily rolled a blunt in the front seat, and Riku wouldn’t stop fussing about how there was weed all over his dashboard; with the plucky echoes of The Shins in his ears; when Roxas realized that nights like these were meant to be taken advantage of; he swore on his belt buckle, Riku’s sports jersey, the dangling dice on the rearview mirror- on everything in his sight- on that night he wouldn’t just be going to test the waters. Tonight, he would dive right in to the deep end of the pool and let the city float him wherever, whenever.   
  
No drowning allowed.   
  
****

xXx

****  
  
“Axel is a smoker, a drinker, and a night owl. He doesn't read anything that doesn't have explosions in it, can't be fucked to grasp long division, and would rather lay in bed with an N64 controller than another human being. He likes to take pens apart, and then put them back together without the springy bit, which he saves and strings onto a thread of dental floss around his neck. He doesn't exercise, other than the fourteen and a half minute walk to the pawn shop where he works selling overpriced old shit, and when there's a party to go to, he takes the tram. He drinks orange juice like it's going out of style and always talks about buying plants and then accidentally killing them.  
  
"So, _of course_ he's watching his figure," Riku finished with a resolute scowl on his face. He flipped open the cardboard box in Roxas's grasp and grabbed a slice of pizza with one hand, considered the lukewarm pie for a moment more, and then snagged another. He arched his neck over the throng of people and caught Sora's gaze from across the room, gesturing him over with two pizza filled hands. Roxas hardly noticed when the box was lifted out of his grasp by a passing food-monger; he was still looking out across the room, where a bone-thin redhead was leaning against the open bay window, sucking on a cigarette and bobbing his head to the blaring music.   
  
"Don't even worry about him, Roxas. He's rude like that to everyone," Riku called over his shoulder, bumping some empty plastic cups over. He searched for napkins on the cluttered table with two carefully balanced pizza slices stacked on top of one another in one palm.   
  
"Just don't dwell on it, kay? Forget about him. You've got better things to waste time on."   
  
Roxas's eyes rolled skyward and he laughed, "Hah, like what? I was just curious." There was a little bit of a defensive edge to his voice, and like a shark in water, Riku picked up on the sheer hint of desperation.   
  
"Yeah, _I know._ Curiosity kills." A catty smirk worked its way across the other boy’s face as he noticed a lightly crumpled roll of paper towels that had rolled underneath the fold out table from in between the empty cardboard beer cases.   
  
"Killed the cat, not the young adult." Roxas leaned gently against flimsy table, careful not to overturn any half-full cups, and rubbed his greasy palms against the thighs of his jeans. "He should probably eat more anyway."   
  
"Yeah, okay, let it go dude."   
  
Roxas narrowed his eyes as the silver-haired boy sent him another knowing look and made an awkward attempt to reach underneath the table whilst keeping his pizza-laden hand hovering over his head.   
  
"I'm not making it that big of a deal. It's not a big deal. I just asked him if he wanted pizza."   
  
"Mmmhmm," Riku said, his voice muffled from bring wedged halfway under the table.  
  
"What are you getting at? It was an innocent question," Roxas swung his right leg behind him a little, hoping to catch Riku upside the head with his shoe. Unfortunately, he only managed to poke an empty beer case with his toe, but he didn’t care so much when he let his eyes sweep in the direction of the bay window again.  
  
"Everyone asks." Riku's head popped back into sight, and after he struggled back into an upright position, he begun to tear at the wrinkled paper towels.   
  
"What? I'm not—"   
  
"No, _dude,_ " he said, turning from his little liberally wrapped pizza slices and wearing the most honest smirk Roxas would swear he'd ever seen Riku wear. " _Everybody_ asks."  
  
Roxas stiffened slightly and fixed his eyes to the floor, but he managed to work his fingers through his spiked hair as casually as possible.  
  
"Are you saying—"   
  
"No, dude- Come on, _I know_. He's hard to ignore. If we're being honest here," Riku leaned over to speak directly into Roxas's ear, so the shorter boy couldn’t help but be swamped in hot, alcohol-tainted breath, "I won't deny that I was ever interested," then Riku pulled back abruptly and shrugged, "but he's just not in on it."   
  
Riku's arm worked over Roxas's shoulder in fervent, drunken rapport. Roxas struggled with the unexpected weight, but grimaced and tried to listen.   
  
"I spent my first couple weeks here in Twilight being 'curious' about Axel, and it was one of the most pointless and uninspiring periods of my life. The dude's just not, you know, of the right material to be 'curious' about."   
  
Roxas only barely understood what was coming out of Riku's liquor-loosened mouth because he was still reeling over the fact that _Riku_ was into guys at some point of his life, and what was more, that he wasn't the only person he knew who was interested in his own gender. It was a brilliant, revealing moment of his life that was suddenly dwarfed by the fact—  
  
"The right material?" Roxas asked dubiously, raking another nervous hand through his hair.   
  
Riku struggled with the next few words that he wrangled together, "I— er –uh, you know. Not that he's straight— I mean I don't even know for sure, really- I've seen him wear chick's clothes more times than I care to count— but it's more like he isn't into anything other than, well, the stuff I mentioned earlier: cigarettes, staying up late, video games, killing plants..." Riku noticed Sora pushing through the crowd toward them.  
  
"...pen springs," he finished slowly, and made an effort to stand up straighter, clutching the pizza to his chest, as people who were as bizarrely smitten with his brother were wont to.   
  
"Pen springs? You guys gotta find something more interesting to talk about," Sora said with slightly labored breath as he finally settled next to Riku. "Where's my pizza? You got me over here for pizza and I aim to retrieve it." Riku handed him his wrapped-up slice, and Sora tore into it as if he hadn’t eaten in days.  
  
Watching over this exchange quietly, Roxas desperately tried to think of something to say as Riku picked up his own slice and dug in as well. He didn’t really know what he should bring up, whether he should defend himself or probe for more information about—  
  
"...I think it's great—"  
  
"Wha—?" Sora turned to him with wide, red-rimmed eyes and a gaping mouthful of pizza. Riku glanced at him over his own slice, his eyebrows disappearing under his bangs.   
  
"Great party," Roxas amended quickly. He looked away from Sora's intense, glassy stare and back toward the window. Axel was still there, leaning and smoking and nodding, but then someone called his name from across the room, just audible over the pounding bass of the music. He raised his hand in response, turned to flick the butt of his cigarette out the window, and coolly strutted though the crowd towards the stairs.   
  
_Shit,_ Roxas cursed, tilting his head to try to get a better angle, _I think it's great that he can wear jeans slung that low._ But really, as Roxas scaled the length of Axel's lean backside with rapt, attentive eyes, he thought it was great that Riku trusted him enough to share that kind of information with him; that his first night of spring break in Twilight Town is being spent with his brother and his brother's best friend at a great fucking party; that this guy is the first male enigma in years to turn his nerves to complete mush; but most of all, Roxas thought it was _fucking amazing_ that Axel collected the springy bits from pens.   
  
Roxas dug a wrinkled package of cigarettes out of the depths of his pockets and fished a stray lighter from the littered surface of the fold-out table.   
  
"Trams stop running at...?" he begun, staring intently at the lighter, wiping imaginary dirt off its plastic sheath with his forefinger.   
  
"2:00," Riku finished, throwing him an uncertain expression over greasy mushrooms and pepperoni.   
  
"Going out for a smoke?" Sora piqued up, "Gimme one. I'm feelin' like a smoker tonight." He looked at Riku with a grin that would swallow sunshine and held his hand out expectantly.   
  
With a raised brows, Roxas opened his mouth to protest, but Sora only stared back with indifferent resilience and a goofy smile. Wordlessly, he slid a cigarette out of the pack and slipped it behind Sora's ear before turning towards the house's front.   
  
He could almost feel the poignant mental-prodding of Riku's concern from where he was teetering alongside Sora, munching idly on his pizza slice. Roxas would be lying if he said he hadn't bothered to listen to Riku's advice. With all things considered through, Roxas saw himself in one of those rare and fleeting moments of life in which there was an apple, or a lollipop- fuck it, just some ripe opportunity that could be his for the taking. There was a one in a million chance that Roxas could wake up happy with himself in the morning, and while those probabilities would have been daunting to him earlier tonight, whether it was the beer in his stomach, or the vaguely acrid fumes from the basement, or the liberation of his first day in a new town, they were but alien statistics to him now.   
  
A new train of logic was working its way through Roxas's brain, and with some wavering confidence, he hooked a finger around an unopened beer and slipped out the front door onto the porch. He walked out to the edge of the deck and crouched over the steps descending to the main walkway; Roxas pulled his phone out of his shirt pocket and took a long, pondering look at the tiny, white screen. _It's a half hour to two,_ he thought as he uncapped his beer and pitched the metal cap into the bushes.   
  
_That's plenty of time to catch him at the door._   
  
He was a man with a plan, though a hastily thought out one, at best. _But what the fuck ever, you know?_ Roxas thought. There was no harm in being a little curious. Just scratching an itch, testing the water, and getting ready to ride the waves. Roxas tipped the neck of the bottle into his open mouth, splayed one hand out on the wooden planking of the porch and waited.   
  
Time to weigh anchor and cut loose. It was gonna be a long night.


	2. A City to Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To know you, is to love you. And what's worth knowing, really?

**_He seemed impressed by the way you came in.  
"Tell us a story, I know you're not boring."  
  
I was afraid that you would not insist.  
"You sound so sleepy,. Just take this, now leave me"  
  
I said please don't slow me down if I'm going too fast  
You're in a strange part of our town..._  
  
  
xXx **  
  
There wasn’t a corner of Twilight Town that looked like any of the others. Sure there were dazzling lights, and spectacular buildings, and bars by the dozen, but no matter what square of cement you planted your feet on, not a thing would look the same as the last. It was a decoupage of urban spectacle, home to its own diverse neighborhoods. There was Short South, the street of art galleries and fine dining that stretched for a mile through the center of the city. There was the Highwind Arena District and the Shinra Stadium, where the sports fans congregated in the good weather. And then, there was No-Town, the dark, black-lit den of metropolitan nightlife, which branched out from the UT campus. But on the vast, incandescent skyline of Twilight Town, just on the very brim of that line-up of crooked skyscrapers, there was the Shadowbox.   
  
It was the old, mid-suburban tumor that hung onto the urban nucleus of Twilight like a film of fat on Thanksgiving gravy. Clusters of old Victorian houses and bare-boned local businesses pressed together like sardines in a can lines the streets, and packed tighter together than the architecture were the people. Where downtown was the spread of jeweled finery on blue velvet, the Shadowbox district was the bowl of multi-colored, plastic beads and a knot of twine on a plastic tablecloth; the twine was to strangle yourself with.   
  
The Shadowbox was where urbanites went to die, or more accurately, to raise children. Apart from the string of schools and a few awkwardly designed parks, there wasn’t a lot broken up cement for the young populace to enjoy. Everything was a little too close the college bars and shady tattoo parlors to enjoy singularly. The adults were nauseating and irritable, the children that roamed around in their footsteps naive and aimless. But what make the majority of this populace so painstakingly miserable was the critical mass of _bored_ young adults. But as they say, teenagers complain there's nothing to do, and then stay out all night doing it.   
  
In the center of the Shadowbox district, on the corner of Rivet and High, there was a little brownstone pawn shop that had been void of all noise for the better part of an hour. No shuffling old-lady slipper-shoe sounds grating on the linoleum floors, or gabby high school girls poking through purses and gossiping about so-and-so this and _blah, blah, blah_. Just the subtle click-clack of calculator buttons and the tinny feedback from the orbesque clock-radio on the glass counter. The rake-thin attendant, curled up on a stool behind the counter had already tried on all the jewelry in the display case, reorganized the racks of sunflower bonnets and pill-box hats by color, and counted all the cash in the register three times.   
  
“Five. Eight. Zero. Zero. Eight.”   
  
He wasn’t necessarily done with the calculator though. Heh.   
  
But he had been there for a while now, and there were only eight excruciating minutes until he could lock up and make the mad dash to the corner to leap on the west-bound tram. Eight minutes to fill with dirty words, jittery knees, and impatient sighs. It should have been no time at all- after all it was only eight minutes- but the hands on the grandfather clock were simply not moving. There was a painful restlessness in the air that had him teetering back and forth on the stool like a flimsy Jenga tower, and though he couldn’t even remember the last time he had ever played Jenga, there was no telling where the aura came from; what he did understand was the dull craving for a cigarette and a stiff drink, and the pervading sensation of anticipation dripping over him like a cold sweat.   
  
It’s was a good sign, he decided fitfully, scooting the calculator across the glass counter with his thumb. Great nights were all about losing track of time. Slowing it down, picking up the pace, rapid fire exhilaration, and straight-up stopping the clock. There was an ancient art to it all, that couldn’t be sullied by sitting in one place for four-hundred and eighty seconds more than he needed to.   
  
Screw it. The keys for the shop disappeared into the curl of his fist, and he leapt off the stool with the energy of a tiger leaping through a ring of fire. It was only seconds before the electricity switched off and the door chime jangled one last time. Eight minutes before eight o’clock, on the corner of Rivet and High, the walking-dead residents of the Shadowbox were only just waking up.   
  


xXx

  
  
Axel was a smoker, a drinker, and a night owl. He didn’t read anything that didn’t have explosions in it, couldn’t be fucked to grasp long division, and would rather lie in bed with an N64 controller than another human being. He liked to take pens apart, and then put them back together without the springy bit, which he saved and strung onto a thread of dental floss around his neck. He didn’t exercise, other than the 14 and a half minute walk to the pawn shop where he worked selling overpriced old shit, and when there was a party to go to, he took the tram. He drank orange juice like it was going out of style and always talked about buying plants and then accidentally killing them.   
  
These were all facts that people generally assumed about Axel after being in his presence for more than five minutes. What they don't know, is that he drinks orange juice not because he likes the taste, but because he thinks that the texture is the greatest ever; there's nothing better than a pulpy swish of OJ in your mouth to wake you up in the early afternoon. And nobody, just by looking at him could know that he couldn’t really pick a favorite, but if he were to play one game for the rest of his life it would be a tie between Ocarina of Time— _because dude, that game is sick_ —or Goldeneye 007.   
  
And while he dearly loved catering to the whims of little, old cat ladies and haggling tacky, glam jewelry back and forth with them, he truly, _truly_ hated the dry, dusty smell of that damned pawn shop on the corner of 8th and Main. The air was so deeply laced with the scent of decaying fabric and furniture, that to Axel, it felt like the shop was bound to combust at any second. And absolutely no one knows that because he is a _child_ he comes in exactly two minutes and 38 seconds late every second Thursday of the month, simply to spite the fact he works there, and then work the rest of his anger out by smoking weed the rest of the morning- but that wasn’t so much a secret from anyone, really. And though wasn’t so much of a secret that basic arithmetic was the bane of Axel’s existence, he secretly has the time of his life playing with all the wacky functions on fancy calculators that get hocked by students desperate for cash.   
  
And for God’s sake, he never meant to kill his plants. They just always found ways to commit horti-cide when he wasn’t looking.   
  
That’s what Axel was thinking when this kid sidled up to him with a curious glint in his blue as forget-me-not eyes, a pizza box clutched protectively to his chest. ‘Never seen him before,’ Axel thought as he tapped his cigarette against the rim of a neglected plastic cup.   
  
See, he had been preoccupied with this bubblegum-pink potted begonia he’d picked up from the farmer’s market a week ago; it had just shriveled up and died after a week of sitting on the ledge of his kitchen window. Axel couldn’t be fucked to know why the plant kicked it, but there was a tiny part of him that was beginning to remember that he may have watered it with a bottle of peppermint schnapps after coming home from one of Marly’s sobriety-obliterating soirees a few nights ago. Considering that he had woken up that morning buck-naked on his bathroom floor with two cigarette butts in his mouth, Axel wouldn’t have put it past his drunken antics to murder an innocent plant.   
  
He was about to blurt out his inquiries concerning the alcohol tolerance of plants to the tiny blonde newcomer, but Axel caught himself on his first loosely-uttered syllable, and stuck the cigarette back in his mouth like a stopper in a bottle. Like _anyone_ would know how to respond to a question like that. Axel was eccentric, antisocial, and a creature of habit, and he preferred it that way, but the last thing on his agenda was to scare off more people with his weird, booze induced questions than he did already.   
  
“Want some pizza?” the blonde asked a tentatively.   
  
Axel responded instantly around a mouthful of smoke, “Nah, I’m watching my figure.”   
  
Because really, he had just wanted the kid to migrate back to his teeny-bopper friends, wherever they were, and enjoy their own brand of fun. Encroaching on Axel’s plans for the night would probably just kill whatever buzz Blondie had working for him, especially if he was over here asking Axel _if he was hungry._ Axel knew about these kinds of things. He had his own problems to consider, namely that he most likely had a secret death-wish for his begonia, and that there wasn’t enough liquor at this party. The scariest bartender in Twilight was far overdue for his appearance tonight, and considering he was bangin’ the host, Axel had figured he would bother to show up a little earliest with his shiny clear bottles stuffed in a cardboard box.   
  
There was no time for thrill-seekers, and Axel gave the guy an obligatory, yet appreciative up-and-down from behind as he retreated back into the crowd. There was something, he didn’t really know, _fresh_ about the kid that he couldn’t put his finger on. It must have been his youth; _gawd,_ when did Demyx start inviting fourteen-year olds to his parties?   
  
To be brutally honest, Axel was regretting ever giving in to Demyx's cajoling and pleading, because this party was lacking the essentials; it was a fucking bore. Of his already few acquaintances, most were still lost in the city, with Demyx and Larxene too busy dancing like lunatics to pay him any attention. And meanwhile, in his dark, empty apartment, poor Zelda—the light of his poor insignificant little life was waiting for him to rescue her from the King of Evil... for the thirteenth time. This year. Friendship was fleeting, but game consoles were forever.   
  
“Hey, Ak—Ax—el! Hey!”  
  
The drunken wail came from his flailing, musician friend, stumbling around the foyer and shouting animatedly for Axel to come to him. Axel really wanted to sigh, because fuck it all, he didn’t want to go over there and tell his host that he was having the time of his life, but Demyx looked like a kicked puppy when you told him the sad truth about anything, and Axel liked puppies to an extent, and didn’t like seeing the sandy-haired musician all down-trodden. Plus there was the sheer chance that he’d _write a song_ about it, and playing nice with Demyx was far preferable than playing muse to Demyx’s tortured musical soul.  
  
 _“Axel don’t like my parties…he thinks they’re lame when they’re noooot…_ ” he murmured joyfully as he crushed his cigarette into the bottom of the cup. His little ditty could stand to be a catchy tune, with some guitar accompaniment.   
  
He pushed his irritation to the side, however, and made his way over to Demyx, who, if it hadn’t been obvious before, was thoroughly intoxicated. The boy drank like a fish in water, Axel remembered, and was never quite in his element without a drink in hand. He wasn’t alone in the doorway; apparently Xigbar had finally decided roll around, better late than never. He stood stark still on the entryway rug, one arm wrapped around a large crate of bright bottles, and the other reaching in vain for Demyx’s elbow as the he wavered from side to side like a dizzy puppy. Just beyond him, Larxene was making a show of grinding herself against Xigbar’s back, all for show of course; she had probably had a lot less to drink than poor, wibbly-wobbling Demyx.   
  
“Hey, you came out of your little hole to see us.” Xigbar said in his gruff, lilted voice. He had got a smile that reminded Axel of a cartoon dinosaur. “ _I’ve got a tyrannosaur-boyfriend…_ ”  
  
Demyx coughed wetly, and gesticulated with a half-filled plastic cup in his hands. “Xiggy, Axel’s been here for hours. You’ve been here for _fiiiiive_ minutes.” The color that usually filled his cheeks had sunk into his lips, leaving them red, wet, and slow-moving.   
  
“I know, I know.” Xigbar replied with a touch of annoyance, “But I’m a working man. You think it’s easy bouncing from watering hole to watering hole?” He worked his free hand around the back of his head to adjust his long black pony-tail, trying to use his elbow to fend off the gyrating woman behind him.   
  
“ _Thinks he’s hot shit, but he’s nooo-ot…_ ”  
  
Axel realized that he was still singing this out-loud when Xigbar’s single slate-grey eye jerked his direction and narrowed with irritation, but then Demyx made an awkward reach towards what Axel would politely like to think was his belt buckle, and crumpled to a heap on the floor. The cup in his hand went up, up—and slowly tilted on its side, raining vodka and coke down Axel’s chest.   
  
“WOAH MY GAA-I’m _soooooo_ soooorry!”   
  
At least Xigbar looked a little more comfortable, Axel thought as he looked from his drenched upper body to the older man; at the sight of airborne liquid, Larxene had vacated his backside and escaped into the crowd, giving leave for Xigbar to bend over, drop the box o’ booze by his ankles, and help Demyx get off the floor. Instead of slipping into the fiery outrage that was expected of him, Axel shivered, blinked, and then experimentally pulled the collar of his shirt into his mouth to suck dry.   
  
“Do you fink plamfs ca’ ge’ drunk?” It was _cherry_ coke; that was more than enough to qualm his bitter temperament for the time being.   
  
“Okay, clearly I did show up too late.” Xigbar barked as he dragged a boneless Demyx upward by his belt loops. Axel smirked as well as one _could_ smirk with his shirt bunched up in his mouth, and then unceremoniously spit it out to lend dinosaur-Xigbar a hand with the incredible sinking Dem-dem.   
  
“Not late enough, man,” he passed a damp hand over his eyes and gave a short breathless sigh, “You owe me a drink. Or five.”   
  
Demyx giggled wildly as Axel hooked his hands underneath his armpits and attempted to straighten out his inebriated limbs.   
  
“Nope, definitely not late enough. Xiggy! Hey! Hey! Make Axel one of those thingies with the Bailey’s and the _limes_ …”   
  
And while his blood-alcohol level may have drawn the blinds on the next hundred minutes of Axel's memory, one clear thought resonated as he grappled with the wooden banister, smiling and laughing at Demyx slumped over Xigbar's shoulders, with his soaked t-shirt rucked up around his neck, leaving him cold and hot and sticky at the same time, untouchable and clambering up the stairway to _paradise_ , or something close.   
  
_Thank god_ he didn't have a ball of twine.


	3. Beautiful Stranger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Forget him. That’s what Riku had suggested in the first place, he recalled. That Axel wasn’t the right kind of material—that Axel wasn’t the right kind of guy for someone like Roxas to be into—but—

**_To know you is to love you  
You're everywhere I go  
And everybody knows  
To love you is to be part of you  
I've paid for you with tears  
And swallowed all my pride_  
  
xXx **  
  
_Clack._  
  
 _Clack._   
  
Three cigarette butts bounced joylessly in the bottom of his empty beer bottle as Roxas lightly swung its glass body into the banister of the porch steps.   
  
_Clack._  
  
 _Clack._   
  
He contemplated lighting another, but his mouth had started to taste like he’d been sucking on a burnt coal and his head was swimming with the excess nicotine. Idly estimating the minutes since the buzz from his single beer wore off, Roxas flipped his phone open and glanced at the time—it read almost a quarter after three—and zip. Nada. Nothing.   
  
For the last thirty minutes, the party had been winding down to close, sputtering out like a dying candle. Still slouched on the night-damp floorboards of the deck, Roxas whipped his head around expectantly each time the front door had swung open with a whining creak, only to be disappointed by a vacillating stream of all sorts of people who were _not_ good-looking redheads clambering over him as they leave the house. Boozed-up to the tips of their hair, they hazardously maneuvered around his squatting body, each threatening to ralph on him if he made any sudden movements whilst they were mid-step. He didn’t need to look inside to know that no one was dancing anymore. There was only so much Roxas could expect from a Thursday night gathering of minds in Twilight Town.   
  
Gleaned of most of its occupants, the house began to emit less noise and more of a settling, tranquil energy. Without the music Roxas had been privy to the softened sounds of someone vomiting in the bushes around the side of the house. The simple, compassionate component of him—the part that was probably most influenced by his brother, who’d come outside about twenty minutes ago to run his hands all through Roxas’s hair and steal more cigarettes before heading back inside—had urged him to retrieve a bottle of water and perhaps a roll of Tums for the poor drunk. At the same time though, something hot and spiteful within Roxas was screaming, ‘Forget the loser and just go the fuck home. What made you think this was a good idea to begin with, _dumbass?_ ’   
  
_Forget him_. That’s what Riku had suggested in the first place, he recalled. That Axel wasn’t the _right_ kind of material—that Axel wasn’t the right kind of guy for someone like Roxas to be into—but—   
  
There was something about the way that the redhead had looked, not only with the consideration that he was hot as hell, but that he looked _interesting,_ as if he would always have something fascinating on his mind or on the tip of his tongue. Roxas had lusted over too many vapid beach boys back at the Islands to not recognize the flicking existence of cognizant thought, and that look on such a bangin’ body sent shivers all over Roxas. If his expression alone hadn’t sealed the deal, Riku’s quirky little rundown of Axel sold itself. Roxas had always known that he had a _type_ , but this was his first attempt with a _strategy_. After having played his principal (and only) move of subterfuge and stalking, he was running out of ideas. Quickly.  
  
Roxas felt like a real winner having spent “x” amount of minutes waiting for a guy who, clearly, had never left the party, _and_ had probably hooked up with someone else, _and_ was currently _not_ falling for Roxas’s rapier wit and mad skateboarding skills. Those were his best features, after all—right after being a hopeless dreamer and a completely spineless moron.   
  
“Ugh.” Roxas spit some of the ashy, cigarette taste into the mouth of the bottle before pitching it across the yard in aggravation. The shatter was slightly muffled by the grass, but it was loud enough that the felled partier from the side of the house was roused; a lengthy, hoarse moan ascended from the darkness.   
  
“I feel you, dude,” Roxas muttered glumly, rubbing his arms through his plaid button down. He closed his eyes for few brief seconds, trying to blot out the offending shine of the porch light, and groaned in tandem with another distant yowl from the right side of the house. There was no point in letting the poor drunkard suffer anymore, so Roxas rose from the stoop sluggish and unsteady. He wasn’t exactly going to play night nurse with the guy, but he could at least point him in the directions of the nearest bathroom.   
  
Sidestepping the squadron of red recycling bins amassed near the garage, he loped around the corner of the house, past the reach of the moth-dotted porch light and into the shadows. He took several cautious steps alongside the garden plot that jutted out from the length of the house, treading carefully and peering reservedly into the leafy masses of tangerine-colored azaleas that Stained a bruised purple in the darkness, the untended tidied flowers and ferns grew denser as he walked towards the fenced off backyard. Following the resonance of a low groan, Roxas leaned against the blue siding of the house and peered through the sea of multi-faceted leaves to see a pair of boot-clad feet sticking out from a shivering and smashed cluster of ferns. As Roxas’s eyes adjusted to the bleak darkness he could make out the silhouette of a body— a naked chest that was covered in wet mulch and twig-laden, red hair—  
  
“How do you stay aliiiiive!?” Axel whined raspily, throttling a handful of dismembered ferns with one hand and pressing the other to his eyes. He thrashed his head about in the pillow of crushed plants in a show of frustration.   
  
‘It’s him,’ Roxas marveled to himself, feeling a smile straining against his lips. ‘He’s been out here the entire time. He’s right here, sans his shirt and his sobriety but _here._ He-he’s…’ Roxas’s eyes fell to the side of Axel pursed his lips in disgust.   
  
‘He’s puked in the azaleas.’   
  
All of a sudden Roxas felt very much like he was back on the edge of the ocean with its brisk, salty breezes and rolling white waves. He felt like Prince Eric, looking at a beautiful, mysterious stranger who’d washed in with the tide. And though this mermaid apparently had the habit of drinking like a fish and the stomach contents of, _ugh_ , a tiger shark, Axel still managed to look like a hot mess, with his lean, peachy arms, broad shoulders, and a flat, toned stomach with purple red shadows in the divots of his hipbones…  
  
In times of unbelievable duress, Roxas became an optimist; he shook himself out of his awe-struck daze, cleared his throat, and pushed aside the fanned leaves. He bit back a pleased smirk, and with his snarky, boyish voice asked, “Uh, are you okay?”   
  
“What?” Axel lifted his head from the ground with evident drunken struggle, and though his eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, they shined like light off a green bottle. “I fell out the window.” He gestured above himself carelessly, letting go of the tattered remains of a fern and then let his hand flop to the ground. He sighed and did nothing to brush away the bits of leaf that fell out of the air and landed on him.   
  
“Uh, really?” Roxas hadn’t expected _that_ of all things to come out of his mouth, although logically, it would explain why he hadn’t run into Axel at the front door. “Are you alright?” he asked, lightly nudging the heel of Axel’s boot with one foot.   
  
“Um…” Axel paused and took a second to inspect his half-naked body. “Yes.” He wound one long arm behind him to massage the back of his head. “Definitely. Do you have my shirt?”   
  
Roxas saved his disinterested composure with a disbelieving snort, and replied in a hardened voice, “Uh, no.” Privately he was curious how the redhead had come to lose his shirt, and found himself a little jealous of whomever it was that had gotten it off of him in the first place.   
  
“I need it to ride the tram. No shirt, no service…” Axel trailed off indistinctly and finally rearranged himself so that he was not splayed out over the innocent shrubbery. He began to brush the dirt and mulch off of himself, and even in the dark, Roxas could see the tiny moist trails they left up and down his chest…  
  
“Uh, the trams stopped running at two,” he offered, with numb lips and a stiff edge to his voice, almost too caught up in Axel’s _disarray_ to retrieve his thoughts.   
  
“ _Shit_. So that means right now it’s…”   
  
“A quarter after three.”   
  
Axel heaved a irksome groan and shook his head wildly, only to topple over in dizzy heap on top of the abused vegetation again.   
  
Roxas began, “Do you…”  
  
“How do these stupid plants stay alive?” Axel interrupted with his gravelly tenor, banging his fist against the broad leaf of a fern with brutal force. “I fucking squashed them when I fell out the window.”   
  
“From the second floor?” Roxas replied, suppressing his perverse wonder. He wanted to say that he was impressed that Axel appeared to be mostly unharmed from his leap from a story up, but he considered that if he were as drunk as Axel was, he wouldn’t feel anything if he threw himself out of a window either. But then again, Roxas had taken bigger falls off his board on a daily basis; usually, he was just the only person dumb enough to take them in the first place.   
  
“I think so.” Axel craned his neck upward to inspect the open second story window with rapidly blinking eyes. Suddenly, his eyes locked with Roxas’s again. “Do you want a beer?”   
  
As Axel gawked up at him from the garden bed, he got the full blast of his nuclear green eyes, framed by the fly-away strands of his blood-colored hair, and the grayish, smudgy runoff of wet mascara. Roxas’s throat went dry, and spear of heat ran from the tips of his lips to the base of his spine in the light of that lightning-bug bright stare.   
  
“Er, I don’t have any.” He replied, his voice clipped and short.   
  
For all that he was absurdly sloshed, Axel gave Roxas a painfully derisive look. “Inside—they’re inside the house, I know. Stupid. Do you want one?”   
  
“Uh.”   
  
“I want one. Be a pal, help me up.” Axel glanced at the ground to try and arrange his footing, and stretched out an open palm.   
  
Roxas took a shaky breath. “…Alright.” He fit his hand into Axel’s and pulled. Axel’s legs buckled in the jerk of frantic movement, Roxas steadied him with another hand, giving him purchase to pull himself upright. He was about a balanced as a bottle bobbing in sea water, and Roxas felt as if he was guiding Axel through unsteady dance moves in the moonlight.   
  
“These fucking ferns! They’re indestructible!” With his hand still in Roxas’s clammy grip, Axel ground the destroyed ferns deeper into the dirt with the heel of his heavy boots, minding to avoid the azaleas—as if he hadn’t wreaked enough carnage after treating his body as a projectile missile for their host’s overgrown backyard. “Do you still have pizza?”   
  
“What?” Roxas noticed now that Axel had these tiny diamond-shaped tattoos underneath his eyes, and as juvenile awe washed over him, he couldn’t help but let a ridiculous grin slide over his face as the question echoed in his head. ‘He remembers me?’ he silently gloated, and hoped his excitement hadn’t register too clear with the insobriety case in from of him.   
  
“You had pizza. I think.” Axel gave him a steady, radioactive look in the semi-darkness.  
  
“Uh—”   
  
“Never mind, help me kill the ferns.” Axel laced Roxas' fingers into his and dragged him forward; a wave of lightheadedness washed over the blonde.   
  
“…I thought you wanted a beer,” he muttered faintly around a small gasp after Axel nearly dropped him in the spoilt flowers. He wasn’t surprised that he was short of breath and hot, since that fresh, night breeze had stopped chilling his skin. It wasn’t every day that a hot guy danced him through garden plot at three in the morning; he was bound to blush.   
  
“I do. But I want my shirt too.” Axel turned away with the intent to dive deeper into the foliage, but Roxas looked at the arms of his plaid button-down shirt and got an idea.   
  
“Wait! Wait a second. Here, just wear mine for now. We’ll look later.” He let go of Axel’s hand and stripped off the shirt, dangling out the checkered plaid, un-cinching the rumpled sleeves shaking them free. Roxas was left in nothing but a grey tanktop, but he didn’t really care about his own state of dress as long as he could keep Axel from losing himself in the garden again. Better to coax the drunk out of the wilderness than let him join it.   
  
Axel looked at the shirt dangling in Roxas’s grasp and then shamelessly stared at Roxas’s unfortunately small-framed body. “…You’re really tiny.”   
  
Roxas rolled his eyes in half exasperation and half embarrassment. “It’s a big shirt. Put it on.”   
  
“No, I’ll rip it.”   
  
“It’ll fit. No—Hey!” Roxas grabbed his thin arm and dragged him out of the flowerbed to keep him from further plant abuse. “It’s comfy, just put it on,” he says, wagging the baggy flannel shirt in front of Axel’s face.   
  
Axel pursed his lips for a moment and stared at Roxas again with those cat-bright eyes, but then replied with a recumbent air, “…Okie dokie, smokey.”   
  
Roxas snorted in spite of himself as he handed over the shirt. “I’m not smoking.”   
  
“You were. I was watchin’ you.”   
  
“…Um.” Roxas shook his head and tried to fully digest the implication in that statement as Axel pulled on the shirt, which though admittedly tight fit well enough. “When…?” he stuttered, as he watched Axel fumble ineffectively with the black buttons.   
  
“Xiggy was making me drinks and I saw you from that window. Then I—I drank them. Then I lost my shirt, wait no— I lost my shirt before I drank the drinks and _then_ I looked out the other window there, and I think—” Axel did not wear a look of desperate confusion well; his eyes went all squinty and his mouth fell open as he slowly stitched his thoughts together. “I think my shirt is upstairs.”   
  
“Well, we can go and get it.”   
  
Roxas took a calculated breath, smoothing down the front of his undershirt elegantly, and turned to follow the orange porch light back to the front of the house,   
  
Not a full second had passed though, when Axel suddenly cried out, “No, _wait!_ ”and leapt after his retreating body with the poise and elegance of a stumbling elephant. The redhead managed to snag Roxas by his forearm and yanked him backwards in a poor attempt to drag him in the opposite direction. Roxas cried out in alarm, and tripping over his feet tried to jerk away, but Axel’s light drunken steps were quicker than his own, and his hands were even swifter.   
  
“Hey kid, just wait!” Axel yelled as he tried to get a better hold on him, cupping his palms around his bare shoulders and pulling him back into the shadows.   
  
“Dude, I’m not a kid!” Roxas tried to shake off Axel’s tight grip, but in a flurry of movement, Axel managed to hook one arm around Roxas’s shoulders, and the other wrapped furtively around his hips, drawing the smaller boy’s back flush against his stomach, and practically up into the air.   
  
“No! No, no, no! Stop! _I know what they’re doing up there!_ ” Axel exclaimed in pained distress, clearly not realizing that the front of his shirt wasn’t buttoned and his naked chest was dragging up the back of Roxas’s grey undershirt, and that his hands seemed to be in too many places at once, and that Roxas’s legs weren’t touching the ground.   
  
Bewildered and desperately trying to buck free from restraint (with his dignity in tact), Roxas called back to his captor, “What!? Who!?”  
  
“Demyx and my bartender!”   
  
“Ha… Okay? Um. Get off of me,” Roxas ground out, attempting to elbow his way out of the unwanted embrace, but Axel only squeezed himself tighter against him.This was getting a little bit agonizing for the blonde, just considering how close they are and with Roxas feeling all too much of the of the other’s body, his heat and his chest and his sharp hipbones pressing into his—  
  
“No! You _have_ to stay with me. They’re _fucking_ up there!” Axel roughly breathed into his ear. Roxas wasn’t sure whether or not he was simply hallucinating when he felt a tongue scrape across his earlobe, but his neck bent toward it in arousal and he swallowed a shudder either way. ‘More than a bit agonizing,’ he decided, his hands fisted around Axel’s arms.   
  
“Uh—”   
  
“Do you know what I’m talking about?” Axel half-shouted behind his head, and Roxas could hear the distant echo of his piqued voice from the street.   
  
“Yes!” Roxas pressed his body against the arms that wrapped around him trying to break free, as frantic as a trapped animal. He could barely imagine what this looked like to a passerby, with Axel’s body curved so intimately over his own. He hoarsely whispered his face bright red in the dark, “Yes, I do! Let me go!”   
  
“Then you know why we can’t go!” Axel declared with another frantic shout.   
  
“YES! OKAY!”   
  
The taller boy instantly let go at the other’s panic-stricken cry, and the hysteria of the moment died out like a match in the wind. Roxas took several abrupt steps away from the frenzied redhead, pressing his hands against his rib cage and breathing deeply, before turning around and facing Axel properly. A moment of awkward silence passed and the marmalade colored azaleas became the focus of their attention, as the pair kind-of-but-not-really avoided looking at the other, for reasons neither of them wanted to distinguish.   
  
“…So,” Roxas said finally, his face still fire-hot and his limbs burning from the absence of close contact. “Beer?”   
  
“Uh, yeah. Beer….Sorry.” For still being pretty fucking smashed, Axel had the decency to look sincere about it, and Roxas swallowed all of his pride and replied, “It’s fine,” all while pretending that he didn’t enjoy every second of being trapped against the other’s body. Sure, it was a violation of space, and Roxas could be as skittish as a stray cat at times, but at once he missed the rough collision of Axel’s body with his own started thinking about how he could get it back.   
  
“Kay.” Axel worked up a lilted smile with his flushed lips. “Hang on, though.”   
  
Axel shakily bent down to thread his hands into the leafy ferns and made a futile attempt to fluff them back to the vertical arrangement they probably enjoyed before Axel abruptly ended their life.   
  
“I didn’t mean to try to kill them, I never do. Come on, er—” Axel looked at Roxas once more with those nuclear eyes, and Roxas’s body seized with _excitement, anxiety, lust_ once more, just because he knew exactly what Axel wanted to know from him, and thanked his luck that it was the first and only non-bizarre inquiry he’d been aching to answer all night.   
  
“Roxas,” he said with all the gracious reserve he could muster and a warm, shy smile, “My name is Roxas.” 


	4. Disco Lemonade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re-” Roxas sputtered passionately with numb lips. “You’re gonna get creamed.”

**_I smell sex and candy here  
Who's that lounging in my chair  
Who's that casting devious stares in my direction  
Mama, this surely is a dream_  
  
xXx **  
  
_I’m sorry that I’m a drunk, a pervert, and that I wear too many girly necklaces._  
  
 _Ay. That sounds terrible,_ Axel thought as he poured one cup of orange-something and vodka into another cup of blue-something and ice cubes, swilled it around with a few circular motions from his wrist, and held it out to his left. Roxas pressed one of his hands over his eyes and rubbed them slowly; when his bare arm bumped into the wet side of the plastic chalice, his red-rimmed eyes snapped open, and he took the drink with a shaky smile. It was kind of strange to Axel how much he looked like a sleepy toddler— well, a toddler that would be about five foot and fingers his cigarettes like they anchor him to the linoleum floor. In his grey tank top and ripped up jeans he didn’t look much like a toddler either, but more like some mini-sized skater boy, like how there were mini-sized candy bars. Roxas was snack-sized.   
  
_What?_   
  
If Axel was any good at formulating coherent apologies, then he would have felt slightly more secure in his continuing role at this party as the village idiot. His thoughts just kept sailing away from logical tangents, like a train off the tracks, because all he could think about was candy bars and the little goosebumps that trailed up Roxas’s arms bare arms. There was a massive sand balloon of guilt pummeling him in the guts. He was still pretty trashed, and even though Roxas had spent the better part of an hour helping Axel clean up and find a cold beer, he still hadn’t been able to pay the kid the proper amount of thanks.   
  
“Aren’t you cold?” Axel asked, already beginning to finger the buttons on Roxas flannel, which was a little bit of a tight fit around the arms, but soft and warm nevertheless.   
  
Roxas’s half-lidded eyes drifted over the fastened trail of buttons and Axel’s ineptly moving fingers, and he said all rushed but gentle, “Pssh, no. Keep it on. I don’t care.”  
  
They never found his shirt, Axel conceded, but they did find a lot of wasted alcohol left scattered in little plastic cup islands around Demyx’s house. They had made a game of drinking the leftovers, and it wasn’t a total coincidence that Roxas had ended up with the more potent mixtures; Axel never usually turned down a drink, for the sake of his reputation, but his B.A. level was just off the edge of flammable at that point. Plus, seeing the look on the kid’s face when he guzzled a particularly disgusting mixture of grape soda and SoCo was worth passing off a drink or two. Roxas had the kind of cheeks that flamed up red when he drank, and the brighter those little pink patches blazed against his tan skin, the more excited Axel was getting. ‘Those are his favorite kinds of cheeks,’ he thought to himself. ‘But that’s a weird thing to think about a person,’ he reasoned as he passed Roxas another lukewarm drink.  
  
To tell the truth, it wasn’t a bad way to get to know the kid either. Over the past hour, Axel had learned a lot about Roxas.   
  
“You know, I don’t think I’ve even seen you drink anything since we started playing…what’s this game called? You had a name for it.” Roxas said, crumpling an empty plastic cup and pitching it into the overflowing garbage can. He almost made it.   
  
“Hah, it’s not really a game,” Axel replied good-naturedly, artfully stacking a few empty cups on the fireplace mantle around Demyx’s family photos. “It’s just called recycling. If we were playing one of my drinking games it’d be like Mrs. Pacman, except when you wake up in the morning, you’re in a seedy motel wearing a maid’s outfit with Abba songs stuck in your head.”   
  
“Disco fever,” Roxas chimed, raising the red cup over his head in a mock toast. Axel grasped for an almost empty cup of what looks like flat cola and thrust it against Roxas’s cup.   
  
“May we stay in practical attire for the rest of the night,” Axel quipped in a dramatically lavish voice.   
  
Roxas raised the cup to his lips and scoffed, “Speak for yourself.”  
  
At that, Axel snickered deviously, and Roxas flinched and opened his eyes. His gaze met with Axel’s over the brim of the cup for a brief moment when all they could hear was the warbling strains of radio static; then he coughed a little into his drink, and got all cross-eyed as he took a bigger, deeper gulp.   
  
_There he goes again_ , Axel twittered in his head as he took a small sip from his own drink, _like a little kid drinking warm milk in his jam-jams._ It was almost wicked the way Axel had been siphoning alcohol down his throat, but what better way to make an apology than pooling the party’s leftover riches and giving them to an underaged stranger he just met.   
  
Of course, you couldn’t really call a dude a stranger when he clothes you and helps you wash puke off of your jewelry, Axel supposed. Roxas was a real gentleman. Axel really liked that.   
  
He had even tried to be gentlemanly about Axel’s shirt, and made a short run up the stairs to shout back Axel in the bathroom that it wasn’t laying safely in the hallway. Axel had called off the search immediately, because at this point it was more probable that Demyx was chafing his ass on it somewhere in his bedroom with Xigbar and, really, some clothing just wasn’t worth jumping through those hurtles to retrieve. Anyway, he had far better company in the dining room than he would if he were poking through Demyx’s sheets. He related this to Roxas while he was vigorously rubbing his face with a damp washcloth in the bathroom on the first floor.   
  
“So,” Roxas had asked a little warily as he handed Axel a blissfully cold beer, “what exactly happened in there?”   
  
There would have been no problems answering that question before Axel realized that the awkward, suggestive grin Roxas was giving him had implied that he wasn’t just sharing Demyx’s bartender boyfriend for drinks. Axel had blanched at the mere suggestion, but he almost wanted to own up to the idea that he was a sexual dynamo, so pumped full of sexual power that he fucks himself out of a window; and that his clothing exploded off of him because he was _too, too_ sexy; and that his shirt was probably hiding from him somewhere in the house, shivering at its seams.   
  
But then Axel remembered what would have _really_ happened in that scenario was probably playing in Roxas’s head, and that _someone_ would have had to pull his shirt up, and then slip his hands over chest to pull it off, and he probably have the same shitty smile that Roxas was wearing while he pulled him closer and —  
  
“Uh, Demyx spilled his drink on me. I just took it off ‘cause I was wet. Left it _somewhere_ up there. I should probably steal one of Demyx’s now so I can give yours back,” Axel rattled off with nervous laughter and started looping his dental floss necklaces around his neck, hoping to shield his burning cheeks from Roxas’s view.   
  
Roxas, of course, had abstained again and insisted that Axel borrow his shirt for a while longer. Axel didn’t mind holding onto the shirt though, because the black and white flannel was so well-worn and soft against his skin. He could see why Roxas would wear it in the first place, and Axel in no position to dispute that the kid had looked good in black and white. Because, who really didn’t look good in plaid?  
  
It was silly how… _nice_ he was being about it too; Axel could tell that he was at least a little chilly without the long sleeves, and clearly he hadn’t planned to walk around in a little grey undershirt for the rest of the night. It really did a poor job of covering him up anyway because it was a little too short on him. Axel knew that the fabric was too thin too; he’d felt how thin it was when he’d had his hands digging into Roxas’s torso not so long ago.   
  
He resisted the urge to slap himself across the face and cursed himself for being such an embarrassment to himself. Why did he have to do get so freakin’ touchy-feely when he was drunk? It hadn’t been that long since he’d last…  
  
Woah. Well. Maybe it was.   
  
And that was what he really liked about Roxas. He was a man with a plan: save fellow partier from garden, get rewarded with leftover booze. It was a simple two-step scenario that he’d probably thought up while he sat around on the porch stoop chain-smoking. Axel had watched him smoke idly, and remembered him crushing the butt of one cigarette under his foot, and then fumbling for another from the pack in his pocket. From the window, Axel hadn’t had the greatest view, but he had watched with rapt attention, his forehead pressed to the glass as Blondie tucked the new cigarette under his lip. He had patted around his shirt and pant pockets in few seconds of restrained frenzy before he spotted his orange lighter on the step. Axel had watched the flame flicker up to light up the tip—Then Xigbar had thrust another limey something or other into his hands, and Axel’s memory mostly fell apart after that. His last coherent memory was of getting sent out into the hall to search for a bottle of coconut rum, and the click of the bedroom lock behind him.   
  
Chances were that he’d found the rum regardless, given the state of Demyx’s garden. ‘Nuts to you, horndog’ Axel bitterly recounted mentally flipping him the bird while he was probably getting head from a guy who regularly spit fire.   
  
Axel never had so much of a plan for anything, other than a swimming pool sized post-it on his imaginary, mental refrigerator that said, “Don’t get super wasted! Pick up detergent. Also, keep your dick in your pants. ”   
  
He could count the hours of the day he didn’t spend obliteratingly shit-faced on one hand and, well, there was a reason why he’d come to the party wearing ratty green jeans and a t-shirt that he’d outgrown in high school. Axel never realized what a good job he had done keeping his belt securely fastened at the pretense of sex for, well, let’s not say an abnormal period of time, but a damn good while. Other than the occasional one night stand with a Molly or a Steve-o, sexual relations came alongside normal relationships, and Axel had a little less luck landing an easy lay who didn’t mind pillow talk being accompanied by the rapid fire clicks of his controller in a post-coital death match with a White Wolfos.   
  
He wasn’t exactly horny, but Axel felt a certain edge in the way that he kept looking at Roxas, something that wasn’t so much describable, but was kind of like the way he smoked: he perched his lips on the filter and sucked smoke deep into his lungs, and then exhaled slow. Super slow. Like Marilyn Monroe slow.   
  
So, he cocked his head to sneak a better angle as Roxas bent over to stack more cups. Sure, it was a look that could get him into trouble later, but _wow_ \- Roxas was _real_ easy on the eyes, with sun-kissed cheeks like pink starbursts, and blue m &m eyes. He was grungy and cute, like someone dragged him off the boardwalk to bring him here. No one could argue with him; drunk and easy looked _good_ on Roxas. But that wasn’t something very nice to say about someone he had just met, was it?   
  
The real thumb-biter was that Axel thought he actually liked Roxas. As a person and stuff. Especially from what he had learned from Roxas’s drunken rumblings as he skittered across the linoleum floor chasing half-empty cups of scotch and soda with flat beer.   
  
“I’m from the beach.”   
  
Roxas was tropical ray of sunshine, who liked to bite down his smiles, and churn out surly stares instead.   
  
“I’m a bit of a drinker.”  
  
 _Well, that’s an understatement_ , the redhead blanched as Roxas smacked his lips and emptied another cup. When he finished he tossed it away behind him and wobbled towards the kitchen.  
  
“I like to grind.” He called out behind him. Axel watched his jeans shift and slide against his body as he walked.  
  
He liked to- _Oh_ , he was a _skateboarder_ … Axel realized he was alone in the living room and stumbled after the smirking blonde. _That little…_  
  
Axel folded his arms against his chest, relishing the soft fabric swathing his arms, and leaned against the kitchen entryway. Roxas, his lips still pressed together in mirth, smiling enough that his eyes crinkled behind the glow of his cheeks, skidded over to the metallic refrigerator door, swung it open and disappeared behind it.  
  
“I like lemonade.”   
  
The clinking of bottles from behind the door of the fridge suggested that Roxas was digging for something, and when he popped up with a carton of Minute Maid, folded the paper lips back and took a swig, it took all of Axel’s strength not to giggle into the cup of his hand. “I’m not much of a lemons guy,” he replied lightly, his cool and aloof act broken by the ridiculous smile he couldn’t quite force from on his face.   
  
“Yeah, you’re all about orange juice aren’t you?” Roxas breathed around a gasp of air before he tips the carton into his mouth once more.   
  
_Orange juice_. Like a ticker tape, the word ran through his mind, flashing against the inside of his eyelids like the neon tram lights. He let his gaze slip from Roxas and fall to the dingy kitchen floor. _Orange juice_ , he snickered in mirth as he rubbed his knuckles over his eyes. The yellow and black checkers in the tile clashed too intensely with the checkers in his shirt, so he shut his eyes and steadied himself against the kitchen counter, willing the nausea from his body. He heard the fridge swing shut, and the tell-tale slosh of lemonade as it’s upended into Roxas’s mouth again.   
  
“Do you like Mario Kart?” he inquired breathlessly, the splotchy miasma behind his eyelids flashing red and green like stop light.   
  
“I’m not a bad raci- shit- racer.”   
  
He snorted; he couldn’t resist. Blinking, he took a few, long strides towards the fridge, leaning against the hinge of the door and swaying towards the blonde. “Do you like candy?”   
  
“I like sweet-”  
  
“You look like candy.” Axel let his eyes slide shut again, embarrassed with himself, but he relished the nervous shift of Roxas’s body. His…surprisingly youthful body. Suddenly, Axel could very well taste the lemonade in the air, emanating through the flap of its little paper carton, exhaled out of the soft, pink hollow of Roxas’s mouth. He thought jokingly of powder mixed in glass pitchers, sloppy paint on wooden signs, and Roxas smoking a cigarette and selling ten ounce cups for twenty-five cents. “How old are you?”   
  
There was a breath. “I’m twenty-two.”   
  
“ _Liar._ ” he purred.   
  
“You’re the one making me lie,” Roxas rasped, his voice cracking in the air like radio static.   
  
“What time is it?” Axel murmured, resting his hand next to Roxas’s on the metal body of the fridge, their fingers overlapping on the miscellaneous collection of magnets.   
  
“I dunno,” Roxas replied flippantly, holding the lemonade carton close to his chest. “Five?”   
  
Axel slouched, bending his body around Roxas’s as the boy pressed back against the door, the magnets biting into the back of his tan arms. “Come home with me.”   
  
The moment the words left his mouth, the room felt like it’d been swept into a vacuum. The silence was perfect in its torture, like a egg swept from its shell-made cradle and lobbed onto a buttery pan.   
  
“It’s late.”   
  
“It’s early. We’ll catch the morning tram. Play a little one on one.” Sizzling and suffering; he was hungry, and he was _hungry_.  
  
“…I’m not sleeping over.”   
  
“Is that a yes?”   
  
Roxas rolled his shoulders back and leveled his cool, blue, drink-of-water, shiny, _shiny_ eyes at Axel.   
  
“You’re lucky I’m a night owl too.” Roxas unleashed another pursed-lip smirk that made Axel want to drop to his knees.   
  
_It’s a yes!_  
  
“I’ll be gone in the morning.”   
  
“Ah, but it’s already morning, and I haven’t even given you a reason to leave yet!”   
  
“Yet.” Axel’s chest seized as Roxas’s eyes dropped below his neck and one of his gentle, cigarette loving fingers tapped the base of his sternum once and then once more, like a heartbeat. “One on one, right?”   
  
Axel swallowed the feeling of a firework exploding in his stomach and nodded.   
  
“You’re-” Roxas sputtered passionately with numb lips. “You’re gonna get creamed.”   
  
His finger stayed pressed to the middle of his chest, heavy like the prod of a riding crop, and _dios mio_ Axel almost bent his chin down to catch those lickable lips with his own, press him hard against the fridge and dream about all the things Roxas, _skater boy blue_ , could accomplish with stiff, leather whip. The slim, tan finger finally curled into the fold of the shirt, and Axel felt himself pulled closer into Roxas’s personal space for a brief second, before the boy slid away from the fridge, knocking some plastic letter magnets to the linoleum and making for the front door, Axel dragged along by his collar quite willingly.  
  
Creamed? He liked the sound of that.   
  
The screen door swung open and cracked against the porch like a gunshot. Smothering their hands over their mouths, they choked down their laughter and stumbled down the porch like overeager puppies. Roxas let go of the buttons on his shirt, breaking away to stagger into the freshly dew-ed lawn, heaving the empty lemonade carton into the street.  
  
“Tell your friend that I only litter when I’m wasted.” Roxas quipped to him, staggering back to melt against Axel’s side affectionately as they walked. Axel inclined his chin and pushed it into blonde's neck. Their hands were slipping and falling just short of their intended marks, Roxas with his hands brushing against Axel’s pants pockets, and his own flimsy grasp catching Roxas by his shoulder blade.   
  
“Do you go home with people when you’re wasted?” Axel whispered, teasingly flicking his tongue against the musky, dark skin.   
  
“Only if they’re drunk too.” Roxas slowed his pace and just about let his fingers drop from their almost-touches against Axel’s hips.  
  
“How do you know I’m drunk?”   
  
“Because I dug you out of a flower garden and clothed you.” Two sly fingers dipped beneath the waist of his jeans for a thrilling three seconds before Roxas slithered away to amble ahead of him on the sidewalk, and the fresh humiliation settled in.   
  
It took too great an effort to make an understanding gesture in the dark. Axel ended up waggling his fingers sporadically in the air and gaping with oval-wrought lips at the darkened street. Parked at a slight angle to the curve was a familiar, puce-colored Lincoln with two missing hubcaps and a Batman decal on the bumper.   
  
“You’re friends with Riku, right?” _Puce_ , he weighed the word in his head, _like a combination of ponce and poop_.  
  
Revolving a turn and a half on the uneven cement with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, Roxas located the familiar automobile, looked back at Axel with a considering look on his face, and then at the bruised-colored car.   
  
“This will just take a second.” Roxas dashed forward, pushing the cigarette in between Axel’s lips and lighting with his little, orange lighter before he darted over to face the back window of the car. He tapped on the window tentatively at first, but then slammed his fist against the window in rapid succession until he heard the betraying mechanical whir of the locks disengaging. A shirtless body tipped out of the car and landed on the cement with a thick thud when Roxas swung the door open, and cursed vehemently as he proceeded to climb over the body to dig into the cavern-like floor.  
  
Axel swaggered around the car, ignoring the rush of whispered voices from the back seat. He enjoyed the trill of anxious voices and shuffled paraphernalia against the morning ambience of the city, the whirlwind noises of the highway rolling though the neighborhood like waves, the birds ushering in the twilight. Smiling around the plump filter of the cigarette in his mouth, he mounted his rear on the front hood and folded his arms. Early morning in this corner of the city was an often unappreciated spectacle. Although it was unusual, he marveled that he was finally remembering what it looked like for regular people, whose day was only just beginning.   
  
“You ready?” Roxas appeared next to him with a skateboard tucked under his arm, a sunburst flush splashed over his cheekbones.   
  
Axel exhaled a thick plume of purple vapors, and through the smoldering curls of smoke watched the grey clouds of the sky glisten with pinpricks of apricot sunrise.   
  
“Ready as I’ll ever be, _Sugar_.” 


End file.
